The Banality of Evil

Evil is only banal once it is historical, once the excitement of the inventiveness, the fresh ingenuity that is the betrayal of evil, is dead.

I disagree. Have you seen Polanski's "The Pianist"?

The scene were the old man in the wheelchair is tossed out of the window -- that is the banality of evil in one brilliant harrowing image.
Banality implies obscene carelessness, misplaced indifference. Evil is just that.

As far as I'm concerned, Hitler was never the center of nazi-evil - the evil was manifested by the sausage slobbering, beer gulping subcommanders, whose only quality was being banal enough to go through with the filthy details of industrial war.

If there hadn't been so many blubbering miscreants, Hitler could never have accomplished anything of the sort.

Yes, I think you both are quite right here. Let us learn to look upon 'evil' with a more careful eye even than Nietzsche's.

In this sense the banality of modernity and of modern philosophy may serve us quite well.

It seems to me, though I can't remember the scene, that a soldier is always expected to be capable of that kind of evil, which means it is already historical when it does happen.